[meteorite-list] Asteroid Scares: Why They Won't End

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 10:29:52 2004
Message-ID: <200309091515.IAA20351_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/asteroid_scares_030909.html

Asteroid Scares: Why They Won't End
By Robert Roy Britt
space.com
09 September 2003

Kevin Yates could not foresee the global media circus and public anxiety he
would fuel last week with a routine Web posting about a potentially
dangerous asteroid.

Nor could he know that days later a handful researchers would suggest
ditching the four-year-old Torino Scale, which rates asteroid hazards like
the Richter Scale ranks earthquakes and was designed to improve
communication between astronomers and the public.

In a telephone interview yesterday, the Torino Scale's creator stands by its
value, and SPACE.com has learned that the ranking system has already
undergone a revision, taking into account earlier criticisms, as part of a
forthcoming book.

The media firestorm is just the latest in a long series of foibles involving
asteroid researchers and journalists. It began Sept. 3.

Earth is doomed, again

Yates said he received a request for information from a BBC radio reporter
about a newfound asteroid whose chance of hitting Earth could not be ruled
out. As project manager of the British government's Near Earth Object
Information Center (NEOIC), Yates posted information and expert quotations
about the space rock on the organization's web site.

Newspapers and web sites around the world quickly warned of a treacherous
asteroid called 2003 QQ47. It was on course to destroy the planet, many
stories said.

"Earth is doomed" was among the most outlandish of a slew of misleading
headlines.

Few of the publications bothered to mention a day later that the odds of
impact had dropped to zero. The coverage was called "obsolete and overblown"
by one asteroid researcher, the lack of retractions "shocking and
reprehensible."

The odds of collision were put 1-in-909,000 in the year 2014. The rock
ranked a 1 on the Torino Scale, meaning it deserved "careful monitoring" by
astronomers. Zero is the lowest and 10 is a worst-case scenario. In many
stories, these truths were buried below a frosting of frightening adjectives
and alarmingly active verbs.

Yates, whose agency is barely a year old, became a lighting rod for
criticism from his peers, astronomers and asteroid analysts who have been
similarly bitten by the media in recent years. What Yates didn't fully
understand, but what his colleagues did, was that any mention of an asteroid
with miniscule odds of impact could become fodder for outlandish claims of
impending Armageddon.

Doom sells papers.

By the end of the day -- and even before some of the stories were published
-- more scientific observations had been gathered and the chance of
collision was reduced to zero, "leaving many journalists with egg on their
faces," wrote Leon Jaroff in Time Magazine.

The scientific outcome, indeed the whole process, was routine. Three dozen
other newfound asteroids this year have had similar long-term non-zero
chances of impact. Of these, five still have not been ruled out. Three
asteroids this year, in addition to 2003 QQ47, have ranked 1 on the Torino
Scale.

But for whatever reasons the media didn't notice any these objects.

Importantly, last week's episode was a virtual rerun of four others that
have occurred since 1998. There is one key difference, however. Each time
previously, astronomers worked diligently on ways to prevent a recurrence.
This time, there are a predictable round of accusations and more suggestions
for how to improve the system.

But the sentiment among eight experts interviewed by SPACE.com is clearly
different: It will happen again.

Other victims

"We have all been victims of this same problem with earlier impact scares,
and we have all learned from this," said Brian Marsden, who runs the Minor
Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass. "Kevin [Yates] is newer to the game, but I
suspect that he, too, will come to appreciate that the media are frequently
quite incorrigible and will milk a story for all they think it is worth,
whatever we may say."

Marsden knows this better than anyone in the Near Earth Object (NEO)
community, a loose affiliation of scientists who study comets and asteroids
that share the general space through which Earth orbits.

Marsden is the father of asteroid controversy.

His Minor Planet Center is like Grand Central Station for asteroid
observations. All the data and analysis flows through there.

It was Marsden who issued the first modern public warning about an asteroid
that might hit Earth. On March 11, 1998, he put out a press statement
regarding asteroid 1997 XF11, between 1 and 2 kilometers (0.62-1.24 miles)
wide. "The chance of an actual collision is small, but one is not entirely
out of the question," the statement said.

The story went global.

Within a day, further study by two separate groups (spurred into action by
Marsden's comments) showed that 1997 XF11 could not strike the planet.

Yesterday Marsden told me he'd used words that were "a little unwise. I
should have realized that some people read only first paragraphs." The
statement later noted that the computations were uncertain.

Marsden and other scientists have disagreed ever since about exactly what
happened and why. But most of them agree on one thing:

"These mistakes are made only once by each person," said David Morrison, a
Senior Scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center and chair of working group
on NEOs in the International Astronomical Union. "And I learned my lesson."

The weekend news

Morrison has been earnestly hunting for dangerous asteroids for 12 years.
He's one of the founding fathers of the Spaceguard Survey, an effort
mandated by Congress, financed mostly by NASA, and charged with finding 90
percent of all Near Earth Objects. These NEOs are asteroids and comets
larger than 1 kilometer (0.62 miles) that roam the region of space also
occupied by Earth.

Morrison's lesson came in 2000.

By then, having learned from the 1997 XF11 affair and another false alarm in
1999, Morrison had helped institute a 72-hour review period by the
International Astronomical Union. Asteroid data would be more thoroughly
vetted before public release of potentially alarming impact odds.

Then a relatively small asteroid named 2000 SG344 was determined to have a
1-in-500 chance of impact, the highest ever. The review process kicked in,
and the odds were verified by other researchers. No new observations came
in. NASA issued a press release on a Friday -- something the researchers
felt was required after the review process. Headlines were made. Hours
later, new observations rolled in and the impact probability evaporated.

Because it was the weekend, Morrison and his colleagues say, most reporters
did not pick up on the revised information.

"Once again the astronomers looked foolish," Morrison and his colleagues
write in a forthcoming book, "Impacts and the Public: Communicating the
Nature of the Impact Hazard."

Marsden disagrees with who was to blame. He calls the IAU review process
"stupid," and says it was not the reporters at fault, but the fact that
astronomers weren't available on the weekend to be interviewed.

However, there is agreement on one important point: The problem with 2000
SG344 was a direct result of a 1999 public flap.

Charging cover-up

Benny Peiser was at the center of the 1999 controversy. The social
anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK runs an
electronic newsletter called CCNet, which monitors NEO research and examines
the impact of discoveries and press coverage on public perception.

In a now-infamous situation involving asteroid 1999 AN10, Peiser found
online an obscure scientific paper that described that asteroid's less than
1-in-a-million chance of hitting Earth. He put the paper in his newsletter
and, in Morrison's words, "charged cover-up."

A standard round of press hype ensued, slanting toward the suggestion that
scientists might hide information about a deadly asteroid.

Astronomers have since felt wedged between an asteroid and a hard place,
unsure about when, whether, and how overtly to publicize what they know
about asteroids about which -- and this is important -- they know very, very
little. The initial odds are typically based on just a few days of
observations, which cover a tiny segment of an asteroid's overall orbital
path.

The outcome of the 1999 AN10 incident was the 72-hour review period that
created the climate for the 2000 SG344 mistakes.

Little changed. Last year, astronomers made no unusual announcements about
asteroid 2002 NT7, which for a time carried 6-in-a-million odds of a future
Earth impact. The BBC's Web site picked up on the data and led the way in
warning that the object was on a collision course with Earth, which no
astronomer ever said was the case. Within days odds were reduced to zero.
One astronomer called the journalism in that case "utter rubbish."

Now, barely a year later, other media took the same approach with another
newly discovered space rock.

A clear pattern

A clear pattern emerges from the asteroid scares. Odds of an impact are
widely reported, then within days or hours new data turns up to bring the
chances to zero.

So I asked Morrison and the seven other experts: Why not simply keep the
data under wraps until more observations come in? After all, it is common
practice with other scientific work to go through extensive internal and
peer review -- sometimes lasting months -- before going public with
important findings.

This is one of the few ideas about which they all agree, and they all think
it's a bad idea.

As Morrison puts it, "People think of these predictions as relating to them
and their future safety. These are not just routine scientific results."

As the scientists say it, the public demands to know. But there's a more
subtle reason lurking in the background. While Joe and Jane Public are
unlikely to clamor for this data, there's always someone around to charge
cover-up if it isn't released immediately.

Posting orbital data "keeps the conspiracy folks from getting too vocal,"
said Donald Yeomans, in charge of the Near Earth Object Program Office at
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

Yeomans also points out that the data is peer reviewed. His team crosschecks
results with a similar group in Italy, which runs a program called NEODys at
the University of Pisa. Both groups maintain Web sites that are available to
the public and, importantly, to amateur astronomers.

The amateur contribution to pinning down orbital paths, which arose partly
do to limited funding for asteroid search and study, is another key reason
for posting the data.

"Most of the follow-up activity is by amateur astronomers, with new ones
coming along all the time," says Marsden of the Minor Planet Center. "I
think it would be most unwise to limit access to the Web page."

Who is to blame?

Though frustrated with the media, total exasperation on the part of asteroid
experts seems to be evaporating as fast as impact odds are typically
reduced.

"Actually the situation has gotten better," said Richard Binzel, who in 1999
unveiled the Torino Scale for gauging asteroid risk. "Overall the reporting
has gotten better -- in terms of the content correctly conveying that new
data will almost certainly reduce the threat to Torino Scale zero." The
Torino scale was mentioned in more stories last week than has ever been the
case before with asteroid scares.

But none of this stopped Peiser, the social anthropologist, from putting on
the gloves in this, round five of the Asteroid Scares.

To journalists and their unwillingness to run retractions or corrective
stories on day two, Peiser had this to say: "This lack of journalistic
prudence and accountability is shocking and reprehensible."

Peiser also lashed out at the NEOIC, calling Yates' posting of information
about asteroid 2003 QQ47 "ill-timed and unnecessary."

The asteroid is about three-quarters of a mile wide (1.2 kilometers). It was
discovered Aug. 24 by the LINEAR search program at MIT. Yates' NEOIC posting
said the rock "would deliver around 350,000 megatons of energy in an impact
with Earth," a highly quotable phrase that was highly quoted.

Like others interviewed for this article, Peiser believes the rock would not
have been so widely reported last week, nor with such misleading headlines,
had the NEOIC simply stayed quiet.

The concern, on the part of Peiser and others, is that asteroid scares erode
scientific credibility. They cannot afford to cry wolf too often.

Yates defends his actions. He hoped the NEOIC's Web posting would "promote
understanding of the process of asteroid detection, tracking and risk
assessment."

He is also well aware that sensational headlines sell newspapers.

"The level of interest in our web article did come as a surprise to us, but
we do not believe it is fair to point the finger too strongly at the media,"
Yates said. "Whilst a number of the headlines were once again sensational,
our assessment is that the content of many articles marked an improvement in
accuracy and balance over previous asteroid stories."

Yates went on to say that the NEOIC will continue to "work with media and
science communication experts to increase awareness of trends in reporting
complex scientific issues such as these."

Junk the Torino Scale?

Meanwhile, over the weekend, the Torino Scale came under fire. David Asher
of the Armagh Observatory called the rating system "absurd." An ensuing
discussion led Peiser and Marsden, yesterday, to call for the scale to be
sacked.

"One very easy way to reduce" future asteroid scares "is by dropping the
Torino Scale from the JPL and Pisa risk pages," said Marsden, the Minor
Planet Center director. He has argued against the scale since its inception.

Binzel and his colleagues -- Morrison of Ames and Clark Chapman of the
Southwest Research Institute -- have already completed a revision of the
Torino Scale. It stresses that an asteroid rated 1 is a normal event "that
is likely to go away" and can be ignored by journalists.

The revisions will be part of the book mentioned above, "Impacts and the
Public."

Binzel prefers not to engage in a debate about the merits of the Torino
Scale until the revisions are published, but he does say the scale has been
effective.

"The Torino Scale - gives both the astronomers, journalists, and the public
a common point of reference," he told me. "We have made a good leap up the
learning curve where journalists (not to mention editors) are now learning
that something with a score of "1" on the Torino Scale is not news, just as
a magnitude 1 earthquake in California is not news."

Not again

Whatever the fate of the Torino Scale, there will be plenty more
opportunities for asteroid hunters to interact with the media. The pace of
discovery increases each year.

Astronomers might be wise to reverse the focus of their public comments,
Binzel suggests. Rather than discuss the long odds of an impact, they could
emphasize the overwhelming odds that an object will go away.

Paul Chodas, who ferrets out the trajectories of potentially threatening
rocks at JPL's Near Earth Object Program Office, offered other suggestions
for avoiding a repeat of last week's events.

"I think it is important that we reserve press announcements for those cases
that we find truly remarkable, and even partially worthy of any over-hyped
press coverage they might receive," Chodas said. "It might also have been
wise for the NEOIC to contact us before making announcements based on our
calculations."

An expanded internal dialogue has already started. In part as a response to
the exchange between scientists generated by the reporting of this article,
Chodas, Yates and Marsden are discussing ways to improve cooperation and
coordination.

But no one expects to have much effect on the media.

"I am sure the NEOIC won't repeat that mistake again," said Benny Peiser.
"But I am equally sure that the latest asteroid scare won't be the last."
Received on Tue 09 Sep 2003 11:15:31 AM PDT